Category: Text, Honey bee, Cornell University

About This Collection In 1925, a Cornell professor of apiculture named Everett Franklin Phillips set out to create a major repository of literature on bees and beekeeping. He envisioned this library as an "accessible storehouse of our knowledge of bees and beekeeping." By 1926, Phillips had persuaded over 223 people from twenty-nine states and twenty-six foreign countries to donate thousands of books and pamphlets, and the E.F. Phillips Beekeeping Collection at Cornell was born. Perhaps Phillips' biggest coup was his ingenious plan for raising the money necessary for creating the library's endowment: he convinced hundreds of New York state beekeepers to set aside one of their hives for the library.